The languages of Oman

David Wilmsen

The Sultanate of Oman is a civilisation state, meaning that it is embedded in a continuous historical identity, unique cultural qualities, and distinct sociopolitical and geographic conceptualisations that transcend modern territorial borders. For millennia, it was known as a source of luxury materials and a node on trade networks between Mesopotamia, Africa and South Asia. As such, it has always hosted peoples of diverse cultures and languages. This diversity is reflected in its linguistic milieu to this day.
Quite obviously, Arabic is the dominant language of Oman of the modern era and Arabic speakers have been in the territories of the south eastern Arabian Peninsula since at latest the first century BC, coming into the majority sometime after all of southern Arabia embraced Islam in the time of the Prophet. The spoken Arabic of Oman is a singular variety of its own, distinct from other spoken varieties of the Arabian Gulf and Yemen. What is more, it was one of the earliest of Arabic varieties to attract the attention of European linguists, who published complete grammars of the Arabic spoken in Nizwa and Al Rustaq and in Dhofar before and just after the turn of the twentieth century. Omani Arabic thus holds a special place in the discipline of Arabic linguistics, offering a valuable link to the ancient varieties of Arabic of the southern peninsula, from which much of classical Arabic developed. Oddly, after the publication of those early grammars, Omani Arabic was largely lost to linguist inquiry until the last few decades, when, happily, a new generation of young researchers have turned their attention to the riches that are stored within it.
We may say that Arabic is an indigenous language of Oman, but it is not the only one. Oman and Yemen are the ancestral home of another group of Semitic languages, sister languages of Arabic, as historical linguistics would call them. These are Mehri, with the largest number of speakers, about 100,000, Jibbali (or Shehri), with fifty thousand, being the second largest. Three others Harsusi, Bathari, and Hobyot are endangered, with only small numbers of speakers. A sixth, Soqotri, is found on the Yemeni island of Socotra. These are inappropriately named “Modern” South Arabian languages to distinguish them from Old South Arabian, the language used in writing and probably in speech by the ancient Yemeni civilisations, among them, the Sabaeans, famous for the Queen of Sheba, as she is known. The “Modern” South Arabian languages were discovered by European scholars only about twenty years after the discovery of Old South Arabian in the early nineteenth century. If Europeans encountered them late, local communities and Arab historians had for centuries known of the monumental writings of the Yemeni civilisations, the script known as 'Musnad'. But it seems that local phenomena are rarely acknowledged until some westerner happens upon them. Nevertheless, speakers of these languages were almost surely present in the territories that are now Oman well before the Yemeni civilisations emerged and certainly by the time Arabic speakers migrated into those same territories. Their lifeways, livelihoods, manners, customs and traditions are nearly indistinguishable from the traditional lifeways of their Arabophone compatriates, as they must have been for millennia.
The so-called “Modern” South Arabian languages were never written in a script of their own and speakers of the languages of the present day, who are almost all fluent bilinguals, use the Arabic script when writing. If you know Arabic and heard them speaking, you may encounter difficulty in understanding their speech, but if you saw a writing in one of the languages, you would easily recognise many lexical and grammatical elements that they share with Arabic. As a linguist who has done some field research with Mehri in and around Salalah, it pleases me greatly that a younger generation of researchers have also turned their attention to these languages, among them local scholars who are making valuable contributions in their own right.
Along with Oman’s indigenous Semitic languages are a few that we might call the ‘heritage languages’ of Oman, owing to their long presence on Omani soil and in the extensive trade networks that the Omanis have been plying for ages. Prominent among these is Balochi, an Indo-Iranian language spoken by Omanis who trace their origins to Balochistan, encompassing the southern province of Pakistan and linguistic areas spilling over into Afghanistan and Iran. Balochis have been resident in Oman for so long that they are considered authentic Omanis. They comprise about 20 per cent of the population and many of them bear the familiar surname Balushi.
Another smaller Iranian language spoken only in Oman, in its rugged Musandam Governorate, is Kumzari. The origin and history of the Kumzar people who speak the language is obscure, but their language seems to be an amalgam of Persian, Balochi, and Portuguese, with large influences from Arabic and nowadays some from English, as well. A division of the Shihuh, an Arab population of Musandam and Ras Al Khaimah, also speak Kumzari.
A third heritage language is Swahili, a Bantu language containing numerous Omani Arabic lexical borrowings. The name itself is Arabic, an adjective meaning ‘coastal’, referring to the trade network along the east coast of Africa in which Omanis were deeply involved. In the nineteenth century, when Oman had risen to the strength of a regional power, an Omani Sultan even moved his capital to Zanzibar! With that, many Omanis migrated to the coastal areas of Africa called the ‘Swahili Coast’. Their descendents eventually returned home, bringing their Swahili speaking families and servants with them.
Finally, anyone living in or even visiting Oman can’t help noticing the babel of South Asian languages spoken in the Sultanate of Oman, too numerous to name in this short space. The hundreds of thousands of residents speaking these languages are a modern-day testament to Oman’s ancient enduring cultural and commercial ties to South Asia.
How do speakers of these many languages manage to understand each other? English; the lingua franca in Oman, the entire Gulf and in the world.
Dr Wilmsen is an expert in Omani and South Arabian dialects